Hungry For More

Hungry for More

Re-Engaging Religious
Teachings on Consumption

In his book God’s Politics, evangelical minister Jim Wallis
describes an episode from his seminary days when a fellow student
took scissors and snipped out of an old Bible every verse
that focused on poverty and wealth. The remaining text was
tattered and fragile, reports Wallis; these economic themes
occur in the Hebrew scriptures more often than any topic
except idolatry, and in the Gospels account for as many as one
in seven verses. The eviscerated Bible was an effective prop for
his sermons. “I’d hold it up high above American congregations
and say ‘Brothers and sisters, this is our American Bible;
it is full of holes,’” the empty spaces constituting the mute
teachings that favor the poor and outline the economic obligations
of the wealthy.

Recovering the lost economic teachings—not just of the
Jewish and Christian traditions, but of many of the world’s
faiths—could be enormously valuable to a global economy
faced with unprecedented ethical challenges. Mass consumerism
in wealthy countries has already broken the ecological
bank, with a crippled climate, extinct species, scalped
forests, and drained or polluted rivers standing as red ink.
Now billions of citizens of China and India demand a piece
of the global consumption pie. How can the legitimate aspirations
of emerging nations be met without further damaging
the planet—while safeguarding opportunities for the
world’s poorest, especially in Africa, to stake their consumption
claims?

Consumption is linked, of course, to both poverty and
wealth: the poor underconsume, by definition, and the prosperous
typically consume more than needed, often wastefully.
Thus religious wisdom on poverty and wealth can be helpful
in tackling the emerging ethical dilemma of global consumption.
Restoring the forgotten wisdom buried in the
sacred texts of the world’s faith traditions could help to
sketch out the principles for a new economics—principles
that addresses the challenges of consumption and poverty
simultaneously.

Indeed, the power of inspirational and challenging religious
messages to mobilize believers is at work on the consumption
question in pockets around the world, from Sri
Lanka and Alabama to the finance ministries of major creditor
nations. In each case, religious teachings (see sidebar,
for example) are awakening adherents to the moral dimension
of consumption (and its offspring, debt and inequality),
in some cases with measurable impact. They are a reminder
of the power inherent in the founding visions of many of
the world’s faiths.

Neither Poverty nor Wealth

Consider, for example, the power of “Buddhist economics” to
turn western notions of consumption on their heads. From its
starting position—the purpose of an economy—the Buddhist
approach is distinctive.As explained in E.F. Schumacher’s
classic, Small Is Beautiful, whereas market economies are
designed to produce the highest possible levels of production
and consumption, Buddhist economics supports a different
aim: to achieve enlightenment. This spiritual goal, in
turn, requires freedom from desire, the source of all suffering,
according to the Buddha. This is a tall order in societies of mass
consumption, where advertisers conflate needs and desires
and where acquisitiveness is a cultural norm. Thus the very
attitude toward material goods is one of detachment, a sharp
contrast to the frenzied grasping for stuff that often characterizes
non-Buddhist societies.

Indeed, from the perspective of Buddhist economics,
having and consuming makes sense only as a means to a
well-rounded sense of well-being, in which material needs are
met in moderation, and in which cultural, psychological,
and spiritual needs are also addressed. Consumption as an
end—chasing the most prestigious house or the latest cell
phone—is irrational. In fact, in Buddhist thought the rational
person aims to achieve the highest level of well-being with the
least consumption, since consumption is merely a means to
this higher end.

In this view, collecting ever-greater quantities of stuff,
generating mountains of refuse, and designing goods to wear
out (all normal in consumerist economies) are absurd inefficiencies.
The waste is huge, not just in terms of garbage generated,
but because the outsized material dimension of a
consumer’s life does not deliver any greater degree of wellbeing.
Indeed, evidence from high-consumption societies like
the United States make it clear that when people overconsume
food or sedentary leisure time, health is likely to suffer.
And overwork in support of a high consumption lifestyle can
leave little time for strong relationships, another necessary
ingredient of well-being.

The consumption ethic of Buddhist economics appears to
have taken strong root in Sri Lanka in a village-based development
movement known as Sarvodaya Shramadana, now
present in more than half of the country’s 24,000 villages.
Consumption in the Sarvodayan experience is shaped by the
Sarvodayan vision of development, which is summarized in
a list of 10 major human needs:
• a clean and beautiful environment
• a clean and adequate supply of water
• basic clothing
• a balanced diet
• a simple house to live in
• basic health care
• simple communications facilities
• basic energy requirements
• well-rounded education
• cultural and spiritual sustenance

The list yields a moderate but broadly based approach to
consumption. Commodities are “basic,” “simple,” and “adequate,”
strongly communicating an ethic of sufficiency. And
nonmaterial assets such as a clean environment,well-rounded
education, and cultural and spiritual sustenance are on par
with material ones, suggesting that material and spiritual
dimensions are both necessary for full development. In short,
the list produces a materially narrower but spiritually broader
understanding of healthy consumption than is found in societies
of mass consumerism.

The list also implicitly suggests where to draw the line on
consumption. If meeting the 10 needs essentially provides
for a decent life, pursuit of desires from beyond the list is
necessarily evidence of “greed, sloth, or ignorance,” in the
words of one Sarvodaya observer. Acceding to those desires
would simply be a waste of resources.

The Sarvodayan consumption goals also open up development
opportunities more broadly across society. Modest
consumption saves resources for use by others, thereby extending
the reach of potential development efforts. Indirectly, the
list serves as a quick and easy way to identify the individuals
or groups most in need of further development assistance. This
assessment would be much more difficult task if the list were
a long and virtually endless list of wants rather than a limited
set of needs. The result is fulfillment of the Sarvodayan goal
of "no poverty, no affluence."

Selected Religious Perspectives on Consumption:
HINDUISM: In case of obtaining anything in excess, one
should not hoard it. One should abstain from acquisitiveness.
Acarangasutra 2.114-19
CONFUCIANISM: Excess and deficiency are equally at
fault. Confucius, XI.15
JUDAISM: Why do you spend your money for that
which is not bread, and your labor for that which does
not satisfy? Isaiah 55:2
CHRISTIANITY: How does God’s love abide in anyone
who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister
in need and yet refuses to help? 1 John 3:17
ISLAM: Eat and drink, but waste not by excess: He
loves not the excessive. Quran 7.31

Keep the Sabbath

In the Jewish and Christian traditions, consumption issues are
rooted in the broader question of a person or society’s obligations
to the poor. “Sabbath economics” traces biblical economic
thought back to the evolving understanding of the
Sabbath in the Hebrew sacred texts. The analysis, radical by
today’s economic standards, has challenging implications for
modern notions of consumption.

Theologians of Sabbath economics note that the biblical
admonition to “keep the Sabbath”was more than a weekly religious
observance for the ancient Israelites; it also signified
their commitment to economic justice and ecological stewardship.
Consider the story of the Israelites wandering in the
desert after their liberation from slavery in Egypt. They are
hungry, and complain to God about their plight. God responds
by sending a daily shower of manna from heaven, an act of
compassion that came with special instructions: the people
were to gather only what they needed, no less and no more.
Those who hoarded found that their stocks spoiled, while
those who gathered only what they needed found that they,
and the entire community, were adequately fed. On the Sabbath
day, they were to rest, remember God’s generosity to
them, and reflect on the abundance that exists when people
practice moderation.

Gradually the Sabbath concept took on more layers of
economic meaning. In the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy,
for example, the “Sabbath year” was introduced, when debts
were to be forgiven, prisoners set free, and cropland allowed
to lie fallow, offering the poor and the exhausted land a fresh
start. Next, the Scriptures add the Jubilee year, which occurs
every seventh Sabbath year, or every 49 years (seven being a
symbol of perfection in the Jewish and Christian scriptures).
This “super-Sabbath” year entails all of the liberation and fallowing
obligations of previous Sabbath years, but adds the
requirement that land, the source of people’s livelihoods, be
returned to its original owners of 50 years earlier. In this way
the economic slate was wiped clean, ensuring that nobody
remained perpetually on the economic margins.

In sum, explains religious activist and author Ched Myers,
the Sabbath teachings in the Hebrew Scriptures contain a
clear set of economic principles that are as valuable today as
when first set down. The first principle is that extremes of
consumption, whether too much or too little, should be
avoided. Sufficient consumption, say analysts of Sabbath economics,
can be surmised from the interplay between abundance
and restraint that runs through the Sabbath stories:
the abundance of manna being coupled with the injunction
not to hoard, for example, or the provision of productive land
being linked to a mandate to redistribute it periodically. God
created a cornucopian world, the stories stress; combine this
gift with moderation of appetites and the result is a world of
plenty for everyone, rather than the resource scarcity that is
a basic axiom of modern economics.

The second principle of Sabbath economics is that surplus
wealth should circulate, not concentrate, and that mechanisms
of redistribution are needed to ensure that any skewing
of wealth does not become extreme or entrenched.Central
to this principle is the notion that concentrated surpluses are
inevitably linked to oppression. The Israelites themselves
understood that their own enslavement in Egypt helped to
produce the concentrated wealth of the pharaoh. Today, note
proponents of Sabbath economics, economic oppression takes
the form of sweatshops, sub-adequate wages, child labor, and
other labor abuses. On these are built the concentrated wealth
of many individuals, corporations, and nations.

The third principle is that believers should rest regularly,
thank God for their blessings, and remember the first two
principles through the rituals of community worship.

The Power To Inspire

It is easy to dismiss these teachings as quaint artifacts of the
Jewish and Christian traditions.After all, it is probably safe to
assume that only a tiny minority of practicing Jews and Christians
read the various stories of Sabbath obligations as treatises
in economics. But these texts are clearly not merely
utopian visions: they were the operating ethical base of the
Hebrew economy thousands of years ago. There is no reason,
in principle,why the same ethical imagination could not
be resurrected today.Moreover, the principles of Sabbath economics
have in recent years revealed their power to energize
important publics on debt and taxation issues, cousins to
consumption because the way they are addressed can raise the
consumption levels of the poorest and curb the consumption
of the wealthiest.

Perhaps the finest example of the motivational power of
these texts is the Jubilee 2000 movement, an effort to reduce
developing country debt whose very name evokes the most
radical of the Sabbath economics-based practices.The debt crisis
was in large part created by a recession in industrial countries
in the early 1980s that increased borrower country
payments while decreasing their capacity to export and generate
the foreign exchange needed to pay down their debt.
Borrowers’ indebtedness soon increased to the point that it was
virtually impossible to pay off.What was needed, it seemed,
was a strategy to wipe clean the economic slate and offer
countries a fresh start.

The strategic matching of the year 2000 with the powerful
religious story of the Jubilee had the effect of firing the
imagination of many religious rank and file, who became
heavily involved in starting the Jubilee 2000 movement in
1996.Meanwhile, the Religious Working Group on the World
Bank & IMF (RWG) was formed to look at debt, structural
adjustment, and other economic issues facing developing
countries. By 1997, RWG had begun to collaborate closely
with the British Jubilee 2000 campaign and had announced
the formation of Jubilee 2000/USA.

RWG targeted for action the annual Group of Seven (G7)
meetings of leaders of the world’s wealthiest nations, organizing
some 70,000 demonstrators at the 1998 G7 summit in
Birmingham, for example, to form a ring around the meeting
site, and presenting a petition at the 1999 Cologne summit
demanding debt forgiveness. The petition was signed by 12
million people. The result was the first real reductions in debt
since the debt crisis began in 1980 (previous efforts had largely
only changed the terms of payment).Will Hutton, a British
economic commentator, wrote in the Observer that without
the “moral imagination of religion” and the leadership of the
religious community, “there would be no Jubilee 2000, no
debt campaign, and no international public pressure” to reduce
developing country debt.

Another noteworthy example of the power that can emerge
from a serious reading of sacred texts comes from the politically
conservative U.S. state of Alabama. In 2001, law professor
and theology student Susan Pace Hamill was
dumbfounded to learn how regressive Alabama’s tax code
was, with state taxation kicking in at an annual income of
only $4,600, the lowest in the nation and far below the official
poverty level of $17,000. Meanwhile, timber interests,
which own 71 percent of the state’s land area, accounted for
only two percent of the state’s property tax. Hamill used her
thesis work to analyze the state tax code from the perspective
of Jewish and Christian scriptural teachings, publishing “An
Argument for Tax Reform based on Judeo-Christian Ethics”
in the Alabama Law Review in 2002.

Her work caught the attention of the conservative Republican
governor, Bob Riley, a practicing Christian, who spearheaded
an effort to raise the income level at which state taxation
kicks in to above the U.S. official poverty level. In the process,
he mobilized the religious community, gathering endorsements
from the five largest Christian denominations in the
state, including the Alabama Baptist Convention, which represents
3,100 of the state’s 8,000 churches. Unfortunately, the
effort failed at the polls, largely because of the well-funded
opposition from the timber and agricultural interests whose
taxes would have been raised to offset the loss of revenues
from the state’s poorest. But the fact that a conservative sector
of a conservative state was able to persuade a conservative
governor to make a serious stab at an issue of economic justice,
based on a religious argument, is an impressive testament
to the power of a spiritual appeal to change hearts and minds.

Ideas Whose Time Has Come—Again?

Whatever the success of the Sarvodayan and Jubilee movements,
they represent but a tiny fraction of religious activity
in the world today. And it seems safe to assume that the vast
majority of religious people do not make a connection
between their faith and consumption, beyond the (admittedly
significant) understanding of the need to make charitable
contributions.Meanwhile, the consumption juggernaut rolls
on globally, with wealthy nations continuing to consume at
ever-higher levels and large chunks of the developing world
as attracted to the consumption promise as any other nation.
Is a religiously led, globally effective movement to promote
healthier and more just models of consumption little more
than a quixotic dream?

There are reasons to believe that the potential for change
continues to be significant. For starters,Americans and Europeans
appear to be awakening to the realization that consumption
beyond a moderate level can actually be harmful to
individuals, as the surge in obesity, depression, and indebtedness
suggest.Churches and synagogues concerned about the
well-being of their own faithful have growing reason to take
action to help free their followers from the debilitating addiction
of consumption. Indeed, the 12-step groups operating in
church and synagogue basements for decades, often as an
outreach service, may now need to tackle the consumption
addiction of entire congregations.

The international context is different as well,with the rise
of China, India, and other rapidly developing countries raising
moral questions about environmental impact and equitable
access to consumption opportunities. How will the global
community make room for the legitimate material aspirations
of these nations? In short, previously dormant moral questions
surrounding consumption may now have new power, power
that might awaken the interest of faith communities.

Religions may also be prepared to take seriously the
prospect that consumerism is a serious competitor for the
allegiance of millions of people. The fact that societies of high
consumption tend to be highly secular is not likely an accident.
As more people turn to markets and shopping malls for fulfillment
(however temporary and unsatisfying that fulfillment
might be) religions are challenged to respond.

Competition from consumerism may be the most significant
incentive for religions to become involved, but it is likely
also the most challenging.Could it be that faith communities
have had so little impact on consumption trends, despite
thousands of years of durable teachings on the topic, because
they are as bound to the consumer culture as the rest of society?
Or because they fear that challenging their congregants
on consumption would quickly empty their pews? Questioning
consumption seriously, after all, is to challenge a host of
societal interests and to anger a broad swath of the public.

What is clear from the Jubilee and Sarvodaya examples is
that religious vision has tremendous power to induce societal
change. Religions that re-embrace the original vision—that
take seriously once again the sentiments expressed in those
snipped passages from Scripture—could help to make the
world anew.Wishful thinking perhaps, but theologian Douglas
John Hall notes that religion becomes relevant in desperate
times, that churches get creative precisely when the culture
becomes disillusioned. In a world in economic and ecological
crisis early in the 21st century, these teachings may be religions’
best kept secrets.

Gary Gardner is Worldwatch’s Director of Research.
For more information about issues raised in this story, visit
www.worldwatch.org/ww/religions/.